“I want the doctors to put me to sleep,” says Albert in a disturbing monotone. Necochea wants to know where Albert is, who is with him, and whether he is on drugs. She finds he is alone at his house. That’s good, because he can't hurt anybody. While Albert rambles, Necochea tells her supervisor to have the police meet her at Albert’s home immediately.

Most of Life Flight’s six pilots would simply follow Highway 94 to Tecate, but Mains intends to save time by flying a more direct route, straight over the mountains. Meanwhile, in an upstairs room inside the old wooden federal building in Tecate, a woman sits against a wall, her eyes half closed, her breathing labored, her blood pressure pushing dangerous limits.

Yee has seen more evil than should exist. She has known anguished psychotics, men trying to kill themselves with alcohol, suffering children and lonely pensioners, people beaten and diseased and abandoned on the street — enough to disgust a cop. And yet somehow Yee gives the impression that she has taken it all in empathetically.

Arffmann works into the early-morning hours, cleaning the restaurant and preparing the Pearl for the coming day. “Imagine you were having some friends over for dinner,” he says, "and imagine the numerous preparations you would make. Now imagine you were having many friends over twice a day, for lunch and dinner." When he is free, Arffmann and Freeman clean the streets.

“What you do see day in, day out are 18- to 25-year-olds — unemployed high school dropouts involved in drug offenses, petty property crimes. Those are the people we pay tax dollars to warehouse, and those are the people we will see again because we are not addressing reasons why they got involved in the first place."

"I picked him up off the stool, held him over my shoulder, of course. I had to wipe his rear end. and I took him and laid him on the bench in the dressing room. I looked at him. figured, ‘Get him some place comfortable.’ so I picked him up again, and I carried him to the rubdown table, called the paramedics, called Mom. and she called his wife. In a matter of seconds the paramedics were here."